• It’s been almost four months since I started these morning coffee posts. I like the regularity – there’s been 84 weekdays so far this year, so 84 – (71 + 6 days missed from vacation) = only seven missed morning coffees. On the other hand, I think my daily blogging fix is keeping me from digging deeper into some issues. So I’m going to start cutting back to only three morning coffee posts per week, with the hope of three deeper technical posts and one wildcard post per week.
• Speaking of cutting back, my parents are in town this weekend so I doubt I’ll get a post out tomorrow or Monday. Have a good weekend anyway.
• Windows Server “Longhorn” Beta 3 is out. Now is time to start getting serious with it.
• Joe McKendrick is reporting that Gartner has given the green light to spending more on SOA. Maybe it’s because I work for a technology savvy company, but I’ve never understood outsourcing critical business decisions about technology adoption to a consulting company.
• It’s a Joe McKendrick twofer: He also reports that IBM is calling for a new SOA directory / discovery / registry standard to replace UDDI. I totally get the need a “new UDDI”, though I’d wager that my issues with UDDI are very different than Big Blue’s.
• Yesterday, I made a crack about how un-scalable the Internet would be if every cFonnection went thru a central hub. Two days ago, Clemens has a long post about the implications of an Internet Service Bus. First, I can’t wait to see how that thing works. Second, it’s fairly obvious that not all traffic will go thru this bus (since the bus ain’t out yet and yet you’re still reading this via the Internets), so maybe that answers my question about ESB’s and centralization? That is to day, use the bus where you it’s useful, otherwise don’t bother?

Yesterday’s Morning Coffee was canceled on account of rain. In my living room. It’s fixed now.

• Andre Vrignaud writes about MS Research’s new High Capacity Color Barcodes technology. As he points out, there’s some fascinating gaming potential for these barcodes because they have such high capacity (something like 2kb per square inch) and can be read without special equipment (a camera phone should work).
• According to a Pew Research Center report, Daily Show/Colbert Report viewers are significantly better informed than Fox News viewers. On the other hand, they’re only slightly more informed than O’Reilly Factor viewers or Rush Limbaugh listeners so it seems like a wash.
• Speaking of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, you can now download them from Xbox LIVE Video Marketplace. But at $2 160 points an episode, it’s cheaper to set my DVR.
• I recently re-discovered Remus Rusanu’s SSB blog. He went dark for a few months there, but he’s recently posted a new version of his Service Listing Manager utility, presented SSB at DevConnections and showed how to implement a managed stored proc to receive SQL DDL event notifications. Event notifications is one of those features I didn’t even realize was in SQL.
• Dottie Shaw, one of the program managers on my project, has started blogging. That leaves two team mates and one project member still not blogging.
• Yesterday, I stumbled into some other teams morale event. They were bogarting the cafeteria, so it wasn’t like I was crashing it or anything. Normally, I wouldn’t hang around some other teams party, but they had a projector, an Xbox 360 and two copies of Guitar Hero so I had to hang out and watch them play head-to-head for a while. That looks like a fun game.
• Chris Anderson writes at length about the primary enemy of Long Tail economics: “the absurdly complicated and expensive process of rights clearance”. His case in point is the coming DVD release of WKRP in Cincinnati, which has replaced the dozens of songs used as background music with “Muzak-style songs that could be licensed in perpetuity for a small flat fee” that apparently “sucked ass”.

Sam Gentile decided to spawn a new blog because he doesn’t feel his CodeBetter blog is the place to write about “politics, music, family or life in general”. I understand Sam’s feelings 100%. I maintained blogs.msdn.com/devhawk for these exactly these reasons. But since I’m no longer an evangelist (or MVP, natch) and my blog no longer graces the pages of the MSDN Architecture Center, I don’t bother to provide a dev-centric, politically sanitized and work safe version of this blog. As I wrote several years ago that DevHawk is not a technical blog, it’s my personal blog. Like Sam, I don’t get paid to write it and if you don’t want to put up with my politics to get my architecture insights, you’re free to unsubscribe.

Sam, if you’re reading this, I suggest that you have one “master” blog and one “sanitized” blog, rather than two independent ones. I’ve tried having two separate blogs, but one always suffered. My rationale was always that there is only one “me” and I wanted once place that reflects the things I am passionate about. If I felt a specific post needed to be sanitized for whatever reason (too personal, too vulgar, not technical, etc.) I would simply choose to not cross post it to my MSDN blog.

• I survived the weekend no problem. My wife has the details of what she did for the weekend while I played Mr. Mom. The kids were great, we even went to see the Easter Bunny on Sunday. Wish the weather had been better, but we did get to go on a little walk around the neighborhood between hailstorms Sunday after naps.
• Between taking the kids all morning until Jules got home from the airport and going to opening day for a team morale event, I worked about 30 minutes yesterday. In case you’re wondering, that’s way below average. I typically work at least twice that every day. 😄
• After maintaining a post a day average for January and February, I slipped a bit in March. Twenty seven posts in thirty one days. So that puts me five posts behind for the year as of this one.
• Dale let me borrow Madden 07 for the weekend so I could pump my gamerscore (a practice called gamerscore whoring). I still need 255 points by April 22nd to complete the Old Spice Experience Challenge. I’m not proud of it, but it’s not like I have much time to play these days.
• Mads Kristensen has a new .NET blog engine intuitively called BlogEngine.NET. I wonder how it compares to dasBlog, which powers DevHawk. (via DotNetKicks)
• I wrote a last week that unit test support should be in the Express editions of VS. Thanks to Jamie Cansdale, it is. (via Larkware)
• Scott Hanselman saved his C# Tiny OS project from the impending shutdown of GDN and reposted it to his blog. I first met Scott at TechEd Malaysia 2002, so I remember seeing him present this “back in the day”.
• EMI is going to start offering songs sans DRM @ $1.29 a pop. Assuming other labels follow suit, this is gonna be huge. (via Loke Uei)
• Jomo Fisher writes about using LINQ as a string switch compiler that’s about 900% faster than using a hash table. Money quote: “Any time I see a data structure with a capability I’m not using it makes me wonder whether I can trade that capability for something I do need—in this case a speed boost.” LINQ is turning out to be much more interesting than just a (much) better way to query databases. (via DotNetKicks)

• Many years ago, I picked .net instead of .com as DevHawk’s TLD. My old pal Chris picked up devhawk.com and redirected it to the site because he got tired of typing “devhawk ctl-enter” into the browser address bar and getting nothing. He must have let it lapse because now devhawk.com points to what looks like a splog in development. Part of me is annoyed, but a bigger part of me just doesn’t give a shit. You – dear reader – have found this site, and that is all I care about.
• A couple of weekends ago, I re-wired my living room to enable surround sound. It meant adding a receiver to the mix, and that pushed us into three remote territory, which is too many. So I picked up a Logitech Harmony Universal Remote, since they have one specifically for the Xbox 360. So far so good, but I’m not sure my wife likes it much yet. However, their remote config application doesn’t run on Vista yet, so I had to bust out the old laptop to get it working.
• I’ve written about Spec# before, but I’ve never experimented with it. MS Research just released a new version that support VS05, so here’s my chance. (via Larkware)
• Speaking of MS Research, the Deepfish project has released a new tech preview. However, Loke Uei is reporting they’ve already maxed out on test accounts. (via Major Nelson)
• Jeff Atwood says there’s no substitute for learning on the battlefield. I always say that the only way to get good at something is to suck at it for a while. Different words, same concept.
• According to Naysawn Naderi, the “majority” of unit test features are being added to the Orcas Pro version. This is obviously good news, though personally I agree with Brad that they should available separately VS. Not sure it needs to be in the framework itself, inclusion in the .NET Framework SDK is probably sufficient. I also think there should be unit test support in the VS express editions as well. (via Knowing.NET)
• I’ve been digging Geekdad, but most of the stuff is for older kids. I mean, I’d love to take my daughter karting, but she’s only two and can’t reach the pedals! However, I’m itching to try out today’s post on image searching with younger kids. The kids love to draw on my new tablet, so I’m thinking of not only searching but snipping these images into OneNote for them to doodle on.